1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to card games, specifically the packs of cards or tiles used to play such games.
2. Prior Art
A conventional 52-card pack of playing cards is almost certainly the greatest invention in the history of games. It is compact, lightweight, portable, inexpensive, instantly familiar, and the basis for a staggering variety of games, including many of the most popular ever: bridge, poker, rummy, and a multitude of solitaire games. It has not changed significantly for hundreds of years.
Although its flaws are disguised by familiarity and sanctified by tradition, a conventional deck of cards is not perfect.
For example, the number of cards in a standard deck is arbitrary and awkward. Since its factors are only two, four, and 13, a 52-card deck cannot be dealt out evenly among three, five, or six players. This limits the kind of games three or five people can play and, often, alters the game play (by omitting certain cards to make the deal come out even) for different numbers of players.
A conventional deck lacks the special or auxiliary cards many games (euchre, skat, klaberjass, some forms of poker, etc.) require. This forces other cards (typically jacks, often deuces, sometimes others) into roles for which they are ill-suited. The confusing rules and asymmetrical rankings that result make such games hard to learn and limit their appeal.
The symbology of traditional suits and ranks, especially the face cards, is outdated and somewhat sexist. It lacks both contemporary relevance and the romance of fantasy.
Most essentially, a hand of cards is subject to the whimsy of chance. In most games, a bad hand is a huge, often overwhelming disadvantage. This is commonly assumed to be inherent in the nature of card games and not, therefore, capable of being corrected or ameliorated. To consider it a problem of the nature of the cards themselves requires stepping outside the traditional paradigm, a feat few people are inclined to do.
The layout of a conventional card face is not ideal. Stacking secondary indicia in the upper left corner is handy for sorting cards held in the hand. However, the vertically overlapped cards typical of solitaire games must be separated enough to view both value index and suit marker. This sharply limits the size of the possible tableaux (game formations) or, in computer displays, the size of the cards. More compressed card stacks force players to remember or guess the suits involved or to peek periodically at the concealed suit markers. A truly satisfactory solution requires an improved card face.
Most attempts at changing the layout of conventional cards seem to involve esthetic more than practical considerations. An exception is U.S. Pat. No. 198,217 to Saladee (1877), which offers two imperfect solutions to the solitaire problem. The first is an enlarged set of secondary indicia in which numbers (value indexes) are on, not above, suit markers. The advantage of this approach is substantially reduced by the need for extremely tiny numbers or exceptionally large suit symbols. The former would be hard to read, especially in computer simulations; the latter would occupy most of the space to be saved. The second approach includes, at each corner, a pair of suit markers surrounding a value index. While this arrangement would allow more compressed stacks of cards, it uses more indicia than necessary. Limiting the secondary indicia to two diagonally opposite corners results in two overcrowded corners and two empty ones, an inefficient use of space that unnecessarily confines the primary indicia, which should be centered.
Even the advantages of conventional cards can be a drawback to computer-game publishers. Lacking copyright protection, traditional card games can be duplicated readily by other companies. It is hard for a marketing campaign to distinguish a solid, professional rendition from the crudest shareware effort. Millions play card games on computer, but selling card games successfully seems to require a new foundation.
Despite the disadvantages of a conventional deck, the only two traditional alternatives are of limited utility. A tarot deck, from which the modern deck evolved, has four suits and 22 auxiliary cards (the major arcana) that can serve as something of a fifth suit. A mah jong set is a quadruple deck of 136-144 tiles; it has three suits and 28-36 auxiliary tiles. Both sets are too unwieldy for a general-purpose deck, with far too many auxiliary pieces for most games. Colors are undeveloped, being neither clearly associated with suits nor fully independent.
The only modern competitor to achieve substantial commercial success was Parker Brothers' popular Rook card deck, which used colors as suits but was otherwise quite similar to a conventional deck. Like attempts to assign a different color to each of the four standard suits, this approach is actually less flexible than having two colors and four suits. (In solitaire games, alternating colors differs from alternating suits; with a Rook deck, they are equivalent.)
There have been surprisingly few attempts at substantively changing the organization of a deck of cards. U.S. Pat. No. 1,448,441 to Haas (1923) shows four suits, two pairs distinguished by symbol and two distinguished by color. The intent is not to create fully functional color groups equivalent to, but independent from, suits. Instead, the patent uses suit symbols, color, and two sets of values to create subsets and supersets of suits. In trick-taking games (the obvious focus of the patent), this construction allows trump to be a suit, two suits, or even half a suit. In melding, discarding, gambling, and solitaire games, there seems little advantage to the arrangement, and a deck of 65 cards is numerically even more awkward than one of 52.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,006,906 to Gruber (1977) discloses a specific game using a 121-card deck that seems to separate color and suit. However, nothing in the patent specifies that suit, color, and rank must be genuinely independent, and their exact relationship remains obscure. The deck is much too large for general use, and most standard games have no need of the patented game's implied restrictions on suit symbols.
The previously overlooked U.S. Pat. No. 1,632,941 to Abell (1927) discloses a specific game using a 60-card deck that separates color and suit but, as in Haas, fails to make them equivalent. Instead, color groups are suits, and "spot suits" are effectively subsuits, whose primary purpose is perhaps to add complexity to a poorly conceived scoring system, but whose actual primary function is to complicate and confuse card ranking. In Abell's scheme, in which both "spot suits" and "color suits" are ranked or ordered (the former by geometric shape, the latter by an arcane system not even Abell can explain), a Three could be higher than a Four but lower than a Deuce--and vice versa. This unintuitive arrangement--confusing to one "of average skill in the art" and utterly baffling to prospective players--is enough to deter even the minuscule audience for an invention aimed at making contract bridge "more complex." Far from appreciating the great advantage of separating color and suit--the flexibility to be gained by making them equal--Abell is stratified and inflexible. While the deck's size is "convenient," the exact number of cards (60) seems a happy accident, and the major advantage thereof (divisibility among two-to-six players: in a word, flexibility) is squandered on a game for four people--the one group whose needs are met by a conventional deck. Unsurprisingly, Abell leaves no legacy for today's card games.